This holiday season, I’m going to review a different module, game or supplement every day. I haven’t sought any of them out, they’ve been sent to me, so it’s all surprises, all the way. I haven’t planned or allocated time for this, so while I’m endeavouring to bring the same attention to these reviews, it might provide a challenge, but at least, I’ll be bringing attention to some cool stuff!

Fight of Fright is a 30 page game by Alex Marinkovich-Josey with art by Grace Elsenheimer. In it, a group of trick-or-treaters is given the powers of the costumes they wear, to defeat evil terrors, although they risk losing themselves to their costumes.

You create your characters by picking a kid, a costume and some props, and noting the actions and abilities they provide you. Then, as a group, answer some questions to learn how you’re all linked together. You have 4 dice between 3 linked pools — low numbers fall from your Fight or Fright pool into your Plight pool, making you vulnerable to the power of evil. This mechanic is a neat, catch-all mechanic clearly inspired by Lasers & Feelings, but I love the added pool that functions as both hit points, as a kind of panic saving throw, and also as a pacing mechanism. You move dice between pools using in-game actions, but you roll your pools to fight like your costume or act out of the fear of being a kid, and when you do that it works just like a Forged in the Dark game. And you eat candy to replenish your powers! The rest of the book is refereeing advice — it describes the kind of foes you might encounter (magically animated decorations or other kids taken by the Thrall), describes 3 types of scenes and how to run them, and a few trick or treating locations. The layout is simple, but good. There’s a little line art, but nothing overwhelming. There are no pleasant surprises, but nothing critical that makes the game harder to run.

The basic rules and character generation here is pretty great for a halloween game. My issue to this is mainly from the referee side, and I have seen this issue time and time again in this post month. Realistically, this is a one-shot game: You’re not playing this long term. It’s a novelty game! And given it says in its text “Running the game…can be a daunting process” it’s frustrating to me that there’s still the expectation that the referee improvises the majority of the adventure, based on a few short suggestions. This should come with a built in module, illustrating how the framework that’s given should work — that way you don’t have to say “I know this is daunting”, which comes across as patronising in my opinion, but rather it comes across as “this is daunting, but we’ll help you”. Don’t make me do your design for you; I refer back to my review of Dead After Dinner. This is a game to play with kids: We already have an exemplar in the form of Mausritter. Kids modules don’t need to be huge, sprawling affairs, but don’t expect referees to spin them up from thin air either.

Fight or Fright is almost the perfect Halloween one-shot, it just doesn’t give you enough to run straight out of the box. If it had an extra section with an example of a night out, or had a few extra modules, this would be a fun little game to pull out once a year with the kids. As is, if you don’t mind improvising an adventure — or you have a Halloween themed module from another system to run — this is a really fun choice.

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